Social Question

What happened that made you realize your childhood days are over?

Beyond the obvious physical changes that your body went through in growing up, have you ever had any pivotal experience in your life that has somehow made you realized you are no longer a child, that you are not that special and was expected to take on responsibilities you never thought you had to?

What was that possibly unforgettable moment that has awakened the young adult in you?

My first FT job in my last year of high school that kept our house payment and utilities paid, gas in the cars, a new refrigerator that had to be paid off and groceries. My stepdad left my mother and his baby (and me) so instead of moving out right away as I’d been planning, I stayed behind a year and helped my mother out. The following year I moved out on my own and never again could afford to take a summer off and go hang out with my grandparents who thought I was of age anyhow to be doing just as I was.

My father dying of cancer. He had six months to live.
I looked at my Mom and said “What do you need?”
She looked at me and said “He’s the one who’s dying.”
I looked at her and said “He’s dying, what do you need?”

I don’t recall one particular incident. Certainly making my own decision to drop out of law school ( because I hated it ) and join the Army ( to avoid being drafted ) made me more aware of being responsible for myself. Definitely being shot at was a wake-up call. Heh!

Becoming an adult is an ongoing process for me, I’m kind of a slow learner, so there’s really no one experience or event I can reference. I still don’t alway feel like one and have not put all my childish things away.

But, because my mom whipped us all into shape, me, my brother, my dad even, in the “civic responsibility” department, when I first registered to vote at 18, that actually made me feel more like an adult than getting my driver’s license or turning twenty one. It felt like a real responsibility.

And when I was in college and decided I needed to take a year off because I was drifting and fooling around and understood that “this shit is costing my parents money! I better get my act together because a lot of people don’t get this opportunity” I had never been all that concerned about my parents money when I was living at home or that grateful for the things I had but I guess I was starting to grow up.

But the most important think, was when I started realizing that there was a difference between merely doing adult things and actually being an adult.

Feeling I was an adult? I was 15, in a small town in France with my french class. I was walking through a very tall field of grass with a boy from another group from New York. There was nobody around and no sound except the breeze. We were discussing life, death and whether there was a god (things that most 15 year olds do….ok, I was a bit strange) when he took my hand, turned me toward him and kissed me. It wasn’t a heavy or deep kiss, but it seemed long. I remember thinking, I don’t believe this is really happening to me and I will never ever forget this moment. I felt extremely special in the way that it happened…how odd that it was so perfect when everything else felt such a mess.

Responsibilities? Shortly after becomming a mother, like on the way home from the hospital, I realized I couldn’t kill myself. It was no longer an option. I said it aloud. “Oh shit. We can’t kill ourselves any more even if we wanted to.” Though I certainly wasn’t suicidal I knew I had the responsibility to stay alive, no matter what it took. The next week we bought life insurance.

Oh we were so young and our hair was so fair, we fought with wooden sticks on the frozen river in the starlit evening, our deity was Tempo. His temple was under a bridge, with one of its mighty pillars adorned with a graffiti of a Viking dude with a huge beard and a spear.

I came home later in the evening, and realized I hadn’t done my homework. I was terrified, and feared the teacher’s wrath. I was punished, but life went on, and we fought with Tempo in our hearts, the blood of battle throbbing in our veins.

Then I blinked, and my friends became druggies or pregnant, and I got sent to group homes. Super Mario games were played on my lonesome as I mourned endless game night sleepovers, and Tempo had left me. The blood of battle was no longer in my veins, but syringes were, as I was tested for the HIV virus. In between 10 and 15, I saw nasty and depressing stuff that I didn’t see before, or didn’t interpret as I do now now, and have seemingly been interpreting as for 2000 years.
Somewhere in between then. If not then, then a bit later, when I realized that having to get a job was the only way to survive, unless I became homeless, or a cannibal.

I realized that my childhood days were over when not doing my homework wasn’t the only thing I had to worry about anymore.

@Imadethisupwithnoforethought I’ve lost both my parents and what a precious gift that so very brief bit of conversation was for both you and your father, I think. He died knowing that he had successfully raised you to adulthood and that he had raised a good man; and he died with you knowing that he knew that. There can be so many things left unsaid in life, between us and the people we love, the people who matter to us and to whom we matter, the people with whom we have shared our lives and our history, and then someone is dead, sometimes all of a sudden, of course, it’s too late then, for both the living and the dead, to say any of the the things we would have liked to have said, meant to say, should have said, but didn’t.

Good one @CaptainHarley ! Well, my parents never screamed at 4 am telling me the Soviets are coming. As usual a couple of hours later we were told it was just a drill. But we never knew for sure. It was 1981 and the Soviets had just invaded Afghanistan and were setting up more and more SS-20 launch sites. My division was stationed just 100 miles form the East German border. There were plenty joint military exercises with American troops.

@mattbrowne Similar thing happened there in ‘80 I think it was. During the Iran hostage flap. It was creepy when all the lights went out in Baumholder on a Sunday night. The entire country went on alert. We thought for sure we were going to “get us some” The battalion was loaded out and standing ready to leave the motor pool before we got the order to stand down. Soooo glad it was stopped.

@CaptainHarley – Yes, I did and I think had some advantage over the people who went straight to college…

@woodcutter – Yes. I know Baumholder, Idar-Oberstein, Grafenwoehr, Munster and all the rest. What I hated most were the exercises simulating an attack with chemical weapons. I managed not to vomit inside my gas mask but others couldn’t hold it back. It’s stuff you don’t learn in high school. And Mom can do nothing for you. You’re on your own.